Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

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Steam merely confirms what I already knew as a long-term Linux user: when it comes to discrete GPUs, NVIDIA has long been the biggest player. This isn't just Linux-specific either, NVIDIA commands a large portion of the GPU market period. Forgetting gamers, NVIDIA has the most robust options for hardware acceleration in many cases, especially for AI use cases like PyTorch, and a lot of productivity tools like Blender. ROCm and HAP exist, but AMD has often struggled to gain widespread support.

If there's any strong evidence that NVIDIA still isn't winning in Linux desktop marketshare, I'd certainly be interested to hear it, and it would be news to me. I can imagine Intel technically has a lot of marketshare due to laptops, but then again, Intel and NVIDIA users are hardly mutually exclusive on laptops, either.

I highly doubt the majority of Linux users have Steam installed, especially the kinds that don't tolerate Nvidia's drivers.

I don't really believe the majority of desktop Linux users have Steam installed. I do believe that the majority of Linux users historically (at least leading into the 2010s) used NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, for a multitude of reasons. Even today where AMD and Intel GPUs are clearly the better option for stability, that doesn't mean they're the best option for doing work with. If anything, gaming on AMD is pretty comparable today, in part thanks to Valve. Productivity on AMD is where things are not in good shape. I wish it weren't so, but compare the CUDA and OpenCL/ROCm ecosystems and it's pretty obvious. Most recently, when AMD released some pretty enticing GPU options into the market, ROCm users were surprised to find that their cards either were entirely unsupported, or support had not yet been stabilized. That's just not how things work with CUDA.

I'd pay for things to get better here. I desperately hope that Vulkan as an option for compute can mature and compete with CUDA, but I also think that to do so, quite an ecosystem will need to be built up around it, even if the API and drivers prove sufficient to work as a solid runtime.

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